Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience. For example, users can play media and multimedia content on various computing devices, such as personal, laptop, or handheld computers, as well as mobile phones and other portable media devices. In some media environments, a computing device has access to a computer-readable medium storing media files such as Moving Picture Experts Group audio layer-3 (MP3) files and Windows® Media technologies audio (WMA) and video (WMV) files. Many computers are also able to play compact discs (CDs) and digital versatile discs (DVDs) and have an internet connection capable of streaming and downloading audio and video.
In the realm of personal digital media, there may be several interesting “scopes” of media. For example, at one end of the spectrum, a user may store a personal media collection locally on one or more machines or devices. A typical user's local or personal media collection includes perhaps a few hundred to a few thousand media items. At the other end of the spectrum, online retailers (e.g., FYE.com), online media sources (e.g., Microsoft Corporation's MSN® Music service), and online subscription services (e.g., Napster® and RealNetwork's Rhapsody® digital music services) often have libraries of more than a million media items available to the user remotely (e.g., via the internet). A general interaction model between these two scopes is to extract media from one and insert the items into the other by purchasing and/or downloading media content. Another general interaction model is to enjoy media from the larger scope (e.g., an online media service) without the user having to explicitly download media items locally.
A media player application typically organizes several media items (e.g., video files, music files, photos, etc.) into one or more playlists when compressed media files are rendered on a computing device. Unfortunately, a user often expends considerable time and energy to individually select and add items to the playlist. In addition to the effort required, the user may also have difficulty identifying each of the media items for inclusion in the playlist. For example, remembering the name of each particular media item (or artist, genre, creator, creation date, style, likes or dislikes, mood, sentimental value, etc.) to include in a playlist is often difficult. This inability to recall each desirable media item can lead to a user-created playlist that includes only a few common media items familiar to the user. Such a playlist may be shorter than it need be, mundane, repetitive, and generally not pleasing, even to the user who created it.
The issue of recalling media items of interest is exacerbated with the era of online media libraries, such as for music and other audio, movies and other video, among others. For example, a single user can subscribe to a media service (e.g., a subscription service) having over a million available media items. Such a subscription simply provides too many choices for a single user to review and consider for a playlist.
Because media discovery can be very tedious and time-consuming, many users wish to take a more passive or “bulk” approach to the experience by using randomly generated or pre-composed playlists. Online music services, for example, make such playlists available to users. In the music example, the user can retrieve lists of content, not just individual songs (e.g., “Hot new songs”, “U2's favorite songs”; “Music to skate board by Tony Hawk”, and so forth). But a particular user's personal preferences are not likely to match exactly with those used to generate the playlist. Thus, randomly generated or pre-composed playlists will usually include at least one item that does not appeal to the user. During the playback experience, the user may skip over one or more of these items in the playlist. Unfortunately, conventional media players do not retain this information for future purposes (e.g., subsequent playback, etc.).